Friday, September 16, 2016

Live Design: Vectorworks, Inc. released the English version of Spotlight 2017 software today and will roll out 10 additional language releases in the coming months. Updates to the software range from the new Resource Manager tool to graphic tools enhancements.

7 comments:

Emily Lawrence
said...

I am personally very excited for this Vectorworks update. The ability to share the work with Google Drive, along with many other sharing software, will make life for many designers way easier. This will help when a designer is submitting work more so than the sharing just between the Vectorworks software. The ability to count cables will also help with organization and avoiding confusion. As this software becomes more advanced, I think it will allow people to be more creative because they have more tools to use. This software update will allow people to be less worried about minor things so that they can focus more on being creative. This will be greatly appreciated among designers. I personally have never used Vectorworks, but I have seen people use it and everything that they are adding or fixing will be very helpful. I am excited that I will be learning how to use it with this new software update, rather than the old version. This update will help further design abilities and make it easier for people to communicate their work.

I find that new software is always interesting. This is not to say that there have not been plenty of updates to software that are complete flops, i.e. Windows OS. However that being said this update seems to being doing two very interesting things first making creating a quick plot more intuitive and also allowing for the ability to expand on basic plots in more complex 3D models. The intuitive part is I feel the more important of the two, because it allows more people to be able to use the software and have a understanding of what they are looking at. Take the added cable run feature, this will minor I feel actually is very cool because it helps you track visually in what looks like an easy to read format. All in all I feel that new software such as this helps people become more efficient and creative.

Ohh boy ohh boy ohh boy! Cad software updates are always an exciting time! Vectorworks has been absolutely nailing it the last few years and it doesn’t look like they are slowing down. Possibly the most important update this year is kind of left as an afterthought in the article. Renderworks is now part of the default suite of Vectorworks. This added functionality is huge, it’s what I spent most of my summer working in and it is an extremely cool piece of tech and very flexible for being so integrated into a cad program. Particularly when the competition is still trying to get 3d modeling under their feet. The rest of the update looks like it includes some cool workflow improvements, a really nice and needed upgrade to the resource manager which I can’t wait to get my hands on as the current system is a little lacking. All in all, it looks like the Vectorworks hype train isn’t slowing down for me just yet.

It feels like just last year that we were all getting excited over the new release of Vectorworks 2016, because it was. It’s an exciting update no doubt, and though I feel like I barely got a grasp on all the new components of 2016 last year, I guess I’ll have to keep up. But with Lightwright 6, and now Vectorworks 2017, we in the lighting world are getting a lot of new shiny software. I hope that this doesn’t come home to bite us in the ass when something critical inevitably doesn’t work, but so far I’ve been having a good experience with Lightwright, and I haven’t yet heard of anything bad about the new Vectorworks release. Many of the new features look like worth while adds, and though some of it is fluff, you have to take a big update at face value. I guess it’s just nice to know that there apparently is incentive for these software companies to make the lives of theatrical and event designers easier.

Oh man!!!! I'm so excited! I've already had a chance to download VW2017 and play around with it. Echoing John Walker's sentiment, Vectorworks has added some dramatically new features in the past two releases (2016 / 2017). The improvements to project sharing are exciting, and will continue to make multi-user CAD environments more accessible to novice/intermediate users. The resource browser has been overhauled into the resource manager, which is a much slicker interface. From a lighting perspective, the addition of Cable Tools has the potential to seriously help ME's at CMU calculate cable requirements in a much cleaner and more accurate manner. Now in addition to automatically generating fixture and accessory counts by position for Electricians, cable counts for each position can also be accurately added to hang cards. 3D label legends are also huge, and have the potential to totally revamp how we draw vertical lighting positions. Now instead of drawing in Top/Plan, and using a Design Layer View Port to move the position into place correctly in 3d Space, you can just draw in 3d space, and apply floating 3d label legends. Very Cool!

To put it frankly, this is incredible. Vectorworks has been making huge strides in recent years, such as making it exponentially easier to create lighting pipes, but this update blows all of those out of the water. The ability to track cabling is – in my opinion – one of the greatest parts of this update since I will not just use Vectorworks for lighting plots, but occasionally sound plots as well. Especially if I am designing both for a show because then it’s just so continent. It will be interesting to see whether I am correct to assume that the user will be able to differentiate types of cables since, in lighting today, there are many different types of cables running different information or power around a theatre. The main reason that I started using Vectorworks for lighting was its visualisation capabilities, so the improvements in this area are extremely exciting for me. It also appears to be that Vectorworks is trying to become more streamlined for larger and more complex engineering products, most likely to try to gain more of AutoCAD’s clients. Finally, the seating developments are incredible after I have struggled greatly with placing an audience into Vectorworks many times.

I'm very excited for Vectorworks 2017. The new feature that really jumps out for me is the Cable Tools. Now, there's an easy way to draft and document varying types of cables. This will save quite a bit of time, especially here at CMU, as Ben points out. I really appreciate how Nemetschek really listens to feedback and adjusts the software as necessary. It's somewhat rare to see a company that cares deeply about their users in the software world, but Nemetschek is an exception. Maybe that's a result of them being a smaller company. They know their product is the industry standard for a section of the entertainment industry, so they put in effort to keep it that way. They really are trying hard to compete with AutoCAD. I wouldn't say any of these updates are groundbreaking, but they definitely do make using the program and drafting a show easier. Please excuse me while I go download Vectorworks 2017.